Wayfare
Rebuilt and relaunched after a stalled first version.
A booking app redesign and rebuild, with a new backend architecture built to scale past the original app's limits.
Bali
from $890
Kyoto
from $1,140
Wayfare's original app was built by a freelance team over eighteen months. By the time the founder approached us, the codebase had critical performance issues on Android, a booking flow that took nine taps to complete, and a backend that collapsed under more than 200 concurrent users.
We were asked to assess the existing app and recommend a path forward. Our conclusion after a two-week technical audit: the architecture couldn't be patched — it needed a full rebuild on a new stack, with the booking flow redesigned from scratch.
The work
New booking flow in four taps
Destination → Dates → Summary → Confirm. We removed the account-creation gate (moved to post-booking), eliminated the intermediate price-selection screen, and pre-populated payment details from device autofill. The previous nine-tap flow dropped to four.
Scalable backend on AWS
The original Node monolith was replaced with an event-driven architecture using AWS Lambda and SQS, with a PostgreSQL RDS cluster behind Supabase for the data layer. Load tests confirmed stable performance at 10,000 concurrent users — 50× the previous ceiling.
React Native with shared logic layer
Built in React Native for simultaneous iOS and Android delivery, with a shared business logic layer (search, booking, payments) that keeps parity between platforms automatically. Stripe handled payments; MapBox replaced the slow Google Maps implementation.
The result
The rebuilt app launched to the existing user base and climbed from a 2.8 to a 4.6 App Store rating within the first two months. Booking completion rate rose from 34% to 61%. The backend has handled three peak weekend events without incident — something the original architecture failed at on its first weekend.
Related projects
Ready to build something like this?
Tell us what you are building. You will get a direct, honest assessment on a 30-minute call — no sales pitch.